The next great threat to Indian sport may not be poor infrastructure, scheduling chaos, or talent drain. It may simply be the weather. The very idea of outdoor sports in India is being challenged every day, with rising temperatures clubbed with extreme humidity making it almost impossible to engage in any kind of outdoor activity. It is no longer restricted to just a summer discomfort, but a structural risk across disciplines - from cricket grounds to marathon routes. Former India World Cup-winning cricketer Madan Lal believes that athletes need to be aware of the harsh realities of the global temperature rise and prepare accordingly.
"You will have to be physically fit in today's world. You will have to work on your fitness. The T20 format is very aggressive. It involves quick movements. So a lot of players are getting injured. You have to prepare yourself for heat and climate change. When we played, there wasn't so much cricket. They are playing day in and day out. So injuries are bound to happen," the former India pacer told Sports Now in an exclusive interview.
Dr. Vimal Mishra, Professor in Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, warns that every incremental rise in temperature leads to an exponential increase in heatwaves, adding that science suggests this is not alarmism.
"Every incremental degree of warming will lead to an exponential increase in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves. And this has been shown in several studies in the past and also recently. So heatwaves are among the most robust outcomes of climate change for a country like India. The risk is higher here because we have a very high density of population and there are many people who don't have access to facilities or electricity or air conditioning that help them to adapt to heatwaves," he told Sports Now.
"For adapting to heat, that adaptation has a cost associated with it. So we all can adapt, but we have to spend a lot of money... Certainly, summer is not the season to have events in most of the country. It comes with the risk of injury to players if you expose them to very high humidity," he added.
"Heatwaves can occur at a regional scale, and heatwaves can also occur at a very large scale. And two classic examples are like the 1998 heatwaves that covered a very large part of the country, and on the other hand, the 2015 heatwave, if you recall, that was very localised, but the number of people who died in the 2015 heatwave was more than 2000 people."
"Our body cannot basically work beyond a threshold if you have a very high temperature. Now, we can manage that if you keep on drinking water, your body will sweat, and then you can cool it down. But the problem occurs more for outdoor sports or outdoor workers when you have heat stress, high heat stress, measured by wet bulb temperature, which combines humidity and temperature together," he explained.
"That time you don't sweat that much, so your body cannot cool down. And when you do very demanding physical labour, it could lead to morbidity or eventually mortality also," Mishra highlighted the risk associated with heatwaves.
Dr. Dinshaw Pardiwala, one of the leading Sports Physicians in the country, noted that in elite sport, awareness remains dangerously low outside the top tier. Heat preparation strategies are only now being implemented among elite athletes, while grassroots understanding is “non-existent”, adding that a formal heat policy, not just for sport, but for outdoor fitness tests and police recruitment trials should be mandatory.
Talking about wet-bulb threshold for athletes, he said, "Depends on multiple factors, including duration of exposure. WBT 35 C for short duration exposure and 31 C for long duration exposure," further suggesting anecdotal evidence would indicate that heat-related illnesses like cramps, exhaustion, or heatstrokes are increasing in training camps over the last 5–10 years.
Source: India Latest News, Breaking News Today, Top News Headlines | Times Now
